Joseph and Leon Samuels opened a discount menswear shop called the Manufacturers
Outlet Company on Weybosset Street in Providence in 1894. It grew quickly, and expanded into
a full department store with the construction of a new addition in 1903. The company launched
its own radio station WJAR in 1922, and television station WJAR-TV in 1949. The company
acquired a series of other broadcast media companies across the country from 1963 onwards. It
also opened other Outlet Company department stores beginning with a branch in Cranston in
1962.

In 1976, long-time employee Bruce Sundlun (later governor of Rhode Island) assumed the
presidency of the Outlet Company. Joseph Samuels Sinclair, grandson of a founder, remained
chairman of the board. Under Sundlun, Outlet began acquiring other small retail chains across the
country, and continued to acquire broadcast companies as well. The Broadcast House in
Providence was constructed in 1979 to house operations of the company's flagship WJAr radio
and television stations. A national recession that same year crippled the company's retail
operations, and the company decided to redirect its energies exclusively toward broadcast media
in 1980. The Department Stores division (by now 91 stores) was sold to United Department
Stores in November of 1980, and the purchaser closed the downtown flagship store in 1982.
The Outlet Company merged with the Rockefeller Group in 1984, ending its independent
existence and the Samuels-Sinclair family involvement. It continued as a division of the
Rockefeller Group called Outlet Communications, which continued to operate WJAR/TV until
selling it to NBC in 1996.

This collection offers a fragmentary glimpse of many of the Outlet Company's diverse
business interests, including: a box of early 1970s files from Department Store Division president
Levon Charlson; annual statements from 1936 to 1950; WJAR policy manuals; construction files
from the 1970s; and files relating to the acquisition of firms such as the Cherry Broadcasting
Company, WRG Baker Radio & Television, and Delivery Services Inc. The only documentation
from the first forty years of business is a detailed appraisal of the Samuels Land Company's assets
from 1904, and a single letter re phonograph sales from 1922.

These records were donated by City Place Associates in 1984, via Ernest DiSaia of
International Construction Management in Providence. The 1966 scrapbook was a 1988 gift
from Dorothy Gould as part of the Warren Walden Papers. A single 1922 letter was purchased
from Veronica Owen in 1996.